What business models do Blockchain & AI even unlock

So what is this all even about? What does blockchain even do? How is it so popular and I’ve never known about it? How can I use it to my advantage? Is it even beneficial? How is AI changing the world? Is it a risk to my job or just a tool to enhance my performance?

Searching for these answers can be challenging due to an overflow of information, which can lead to more confusion rather than providing insight. Given that different people have different expectations from technology, I aim to simplify it in a way that promotes learning instead of causing further confusion.

Why bother?

Like every other technological revolution, this is a revolutionary time as well. Just as it took time for people to adopt previous advancements, this will take its time too. Moving early into any development has its own risks and benefits.

As of right now, both technologies have been developed to such an extent that not adopting them could be a drawback for you or your business in the future.

Are your ways traditional?

Returning to the topic, what business models does blockchain unlock? One of the most significant factors in any business is trust. Using that as a starting point alone, opens a wide array of options.

How can you incorporate a layer of trust into your business? For a long time, we have relied on banks for transactional purposes. Not just for transactions, but also for safekeeping our money. If you're an investor, you wouldn't want any obstacles in withdrawing your money from the bank. However, you encounter them. At any given time, a bank could refuse to give you your own money.

So, the centralized authority becomes the bank. Blockchain enables peer-to-peer transactions, eliminating the need for intermediaries like banks.

This has given rise to DeFi, where financial services like lending, borrowing, and trading are provided on a decentralized platform. DeFi, as it sounds, means Decentralized Finance. Your money, your assets, your belongings are your own and no one else’s. They're accessible by you at any time and you don’t want to delay your transactions. Just think of it as having cash on you all the time. But the catch is, it’s safe and secure, unlike real cash.

What trust enables

Based on the sole factor of trust, blockchain enables tokenization. Your assets no longer need a single investor or buyer. They can be owned by a number of people who buy the token of your asset. This can be applied to real estate, artwork, jewelry, and even water. Any real-world asset can be tokenized. When a buyer purchases a token, they become a part-owner of that asset.

For example, if you are selling a piece of land in New York City, someone in Bangladesh will be able to buy a part of your land without having to go through the hassle of dealerships, documents, and so on. They are simply buying a token from you. And it’s already in action.

From an investor's perspective, you can purchase tokens and invest in the profit or loss of that asset. Alternatively, you can store your money in assets rather than a bank, preventing it from devaluing over time. Instead, let it grow in assets and tokens that provide a transparent view of your funds' growth. It's safe to say that a tokenized economy is inevitable.

For a long time, businessmen and investors have experienced unforeseen losses. Even with a profitable business, the monetary loss could be significant. The beauty of tokenized economy is that it gives your unprecedented control over your investments.

Understanding Blockchain

I try to understand blockchain in a way that makes sense to me, and I'm confident it's pretty close to the actual essence of blockchain, if not exactly that. It's a network, but of what? People. Real people. I'd even go as far to say that blockchain is our safest bet against AI-generated models and AI-created humans. So, what does this network do?

It functions like a marketplace. A marketplace where you trade with currencies that you've swapped for real-world money. The success of blockchain doesn't only lie in increasing the user base of buyers. The real security is for the sellers. They can verify the authenticity of the person. They're the ones who can sell without any hassle. And, of course, the buyer knows that it's a trusted party as well. It’s a trusted server.

Any application deployed on a blockchain is not going to steal your information, or that’s what it claims at the least. These applications operate on a peer-to-peer network of computers rather than a single computer. That's how we come to learn about DexS, Dapps, and DAOs. Everything is decentralized, making it a secure and reliable system.

What is AI?

AI has been around for a long time now. Whether you wanted it or not, you've heard of it. You know how the news says that it'll take people's jobs.

Well, let's not get it twisted. AI isn't ChatGPT or any other language model that merely answers your questions or draws pictures for you. My confusion peaked when I heard Andrew Ng mention something that sounded like a common algorithm, but he was referring to it as AI.

As it turned out, it was actually a common distance calculating algorithm that we study in high school. So, what is it then? Well, it's AI. You get results from data-driven algorithms that mimic humans, and you call it AI.

Competition

This was already being used by almost all the big players. Gather data, show people what they usually want to see. Advertise to them what they want to buy. Automate the entire process. Yes, the technology advanced from submitting your choices to just getting what you typed in your messaging app, to receiving advertisements based on what you talked about with your friend, but that wasn’t it.

The real game-changer was generative AI. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that creates new data models from existing data sets. It’s as simple as that. Or is it?

As mentioned before, AI has already shown it’s uses in businesses and how it has helped people enhance their performance.

But now, with Generative AI, the whole dynamic has changed. It creates for you what people did in the past. It answers your questions that you used to get from experts. It’s a great consultant at your fingertips. It has way more to offer than you think of. Automation is a huge factor in any business. You want to decrease the effort in repetitive tasks. AI has got you there.

Upskilling in AI

As an employee, I'm sure you already use ChatGPT. If you don't, that's bad news. Your company might be hiring someone who knows how to use AI more effectively. The work that took you six hours to do, the other candidate did it in six minutes. Yes, there are companies that judge you by your chat links and expect you to use ChatGPT in the best way possible.

And that's not all, if your job involves creativity, you can't go wrong with the use of AI. It's not perfect, obviously, but serious professionals only need a headstart, and they can do the rest. So they have AI all the time for that.

As a business owner. You can include AI in more ways than imaginable. The first and most obvious step would be automation. By automating repetitive processes, you can save time, reduce costs, and minimize errors.

We often look at bigger businesses do something and we want to replicate similar business model or similar tactics into our business as well. Not a surprise that all the biggest businesses have been leveraging AI. They not only use it for the classic target customers, but, also for costumer service enhancement, consumer requirements gathering etc.

We’ve just come out of a wave of Chatbot development where every business wanted to have a humanistic robot talk to their customers and get to know the problems. The advancements in Generative AI have given rise to a new wave of innovation, paving the way for enhanced content creation and significant upgrades in business operations.. The future of AI in business is not just promising; it's already here.

Conclusion

Hence, both technologies are here to stay. We're not going to recover from them as quickly as we did from Web1.0 or, to a lesser extent, Web2.0. Neither are we going to adopt them as rapidly as the aforementioned.

What takes time to arrive, also takes time to depart. We learn from the past. Those who rejected advancements are now forgotten, particularly technological advancements. These are some basic business models that blockchain and AI unlock.

Who knows what technology has to offer down the road? We used to pay a lot of money for sending text messages, and now it's as easy as can be.

Reaching out to people is easy. Talking to people is easy. Staying updated is easy. What's not easy is trusting people. And that's one of the things that blockchain enables. It's up to you how you use it to your advantage. It's your competitors who will decide to use it first. You only regret the things that you don't try. So, are you going to?

This article is written by Hamza Ahmed Lone, Business Development Representative at Antematter